Facility Layout

Factors in Determining Layout and Design

Small business owners need to consider many operational factors when building or renovating a facility for maximum layout effectiveness. These criteria include the following:

1. Ease of future expansion or change—Facilities should be designed so that they can be easily expanded or adjusted to meet changing production needs. "Although redesigning a facility is a major, expensive undertaking not to be done lightly, there is always the possibility that a redesign will be necessary," said Weiss and Gershon. "Therefore, any design should be flexible.… Flexible manufacturing systems most often are highly automated facilities having intermediate-volume production of a variety of products. Their goal is to minimize changeover or setup times for producing the different products while still achieving close to assembly line (single-product) production rates."

2. Flow of movement—The facility design should reflect a recognition of the importance of smooth process flow. In the case of factory facilities, the editors of How to Run a Small Business state that "ideally, the plan will show the raw materials entering your plant at one end and the finished product emerging at the other. The flow need not be a straight line. Parallel flows, U-shaped patterns, or even a zig-zag that ends up with the finished product back at the shipping and receiving bays can be functional. However, backtracking is to be avoided in whatever pattern is chosen. When parts and materials move against or across the overall flow, personnel and paperwork become confused, parts become lost, and the attainment of coordination becomes complicated."

3. Materials handling—Small business owners should make certain that the facility layout makes it possible to handle materials (products, equipment, containers, etc.) In an orderly, efficient—and preferably simple—manner.

4. Output needs—The facility should be laid out in a way that is conducive to helping the business meet its production needs.

5. Space utilization—This aspect of facility design includes everything from making sure that traffic lanes are wide enough to making certain that inventory storage warehouses or rooms utilize as much vertical space as possible.

6. Shipping and receiving—The J.K. Lasser Institute counseled small business owners to leave ample room for this aspect of operations. "While space does tend to fill itself up, receiving and shipping rarely get enough space for the work to be done effectively," it said in How to Run a Small Business.

7. Ease of communication and support—Facilities should be laid out so that communication within various areas of the business and interactions with vendors and customers can be done in an easy and effective manner. Similarly, support areas should be stationed in areas that help them to serve operating areas.

8. Impact on employee morale and job satisfaction—Since countless studies have indicated that employee morale has a major impact on productivity, Weiss and Gershon counsel owners and managers to heed this factor when pondering facility design alternatives: "Some ways layout design can increase morale are obvious, such as providing for light-colored walls, windows, space. Other ways are less obvious and not directly related to the production process. Some examples are including a cafeteria or even a gymnasium in the facility design. Again, though, there are costs to be traded off. That is, does the increase in morale due to a cafeteria increase productivity to the extent that the increased productivity covers the cost of building and staffing the cafeteria."

9. Promotional value—If the business commonly receives visitors in the form of customers, vendors, investors, etc., the small business owner may want to make sure that the facility layout is an attractive one that further burnishes the company's reputation. Design factors that can influence the degree of attractiveness of a facility include not only the design of the production area itself, but the impact that it has on, for instance, ease of fulfilling maintenance/cleaning tasks.

10. Safety—The facility layout should enable the business to effectively operate in accordance with Occupational Safety and Health Assocation guideliness and other legal restrictions.

"Facility layout must be considered very carefully because we do not want to constantly redesign the facility," summarized Weiss and Gershon. "Some of the goals in designing the facility are to ensure a minimum amount of materials handling, to avoid bottlenecks, to minimize machine interference, to ensure high employee morale and safety, and to ensure flexibility. Essentially, there are two distinct types of layout. Product layout is synonymous with assembly line and is oriented toward the products that are being made. Process layout is oriented around the processes that are used to make the products. Generally, product layout is applicable for high-volume repetitive operations, while process layout is applicable for low-volume custom-made goods."

Differences Between Office and Factory Layouts

Offices and manufacturing facilities are typically designed in much different ways—a reflection of the disparate products that the two entities make. "A factory produces things," wrote Stephan Konz in Facility Design. "These things are moved with conveyors and lift trucks; factory utilities include gas, water, compressed air, waste disposal, and large amounts of power as well as telephones and computer networks. A layout criterion is minimization of transportation cost." Konz pointed out, however, that the mandate of business offices is to produce information, whether disseminated in physical (reports, memos, and other documents), electronic (computer files), or oral (telephone, face-to-face encounters) form. "Office layout criteria, although hard to quantify, are minimization of communication cost and maximization of employee productivity," wrote Konz.

Layout requirements can also differ dramatically by industry. The needs of service-oriented businesses, for instance, are often predicated on whether customers receive their services at the physical location of the business (such as at a bank or pet grooming shop, for instance) or whether the business goes to the customer's home or place of business to provide the service (as with exterminators, home repair businesses, plumbing services, etc.) In the latter instances, these businesses will likely have facility layouts that emphasize storage space for equipment, chemicals, and paperwork rather than spacious customer waiting areas. Manufacturers may also have significantly different facility layouts, depending on the unique needs that they have. After all, the production challenges associated with producing jars of varnish or mountaineering equipment are apt to be considerably different than those of making truck chassis or foam beach toys. Retail outlets comprise yet another business sector that have unique facility layout needs. Such establishments typically emphasize sales floor space, inventory logistics, foot traffic issues, and overall store attractiveness when studying facility layout issues.

Konz also observed that differences in factory and office layouts can often be traced to user expectations. "Historically, office workers have been much more concerned with status and aesthetics than factory workers," he noted. "A key consideration in many office layouts is 'Who will get the best window location?' To show their status, executives expect, in addition to preferred locations, to have larger amounts of space. Rank expects more privacy and more plush physical surroundings." In addition, he stated, "Offices are designed to be 'tasteful' and to 'reflect the organization's approach to business dealings.' " Conversely, in the factory setting, aesthetic elements take a back seat to utility.

Given these emphases, it is not surprising that, as a general rule, office workers will enjoy advantages over their material production brethren in such areas as ventilation, lighting, acoustics, and climate control.

Whether your company is looking to incorporate new processing equipment, expand facilities or integrate a data collection system into your existing, expanded, or planned facility, IMEC can help you realize the maximum benefit from your efforts.

Proper Facilities Layout includes optimally locating equipment, materials, people, infrastructure and data collection points to minimize movement, handling and travel distance of the material and labor while increasing overall productivity.

IMEC’s Facilities Layout Approach

Develop and/or verify a baseline drawingIMEC and a team of your employees will develop and/or verify a baseline drawing of your existing facility, to include, if applicable:

ProductionProduction area drawing will show production equipment, personnel, locations and routing of primary utilities (electrical, pneumatic, vacuum, coolant, data, etc.), lighting, cranes, column locations, transportation aisles, material storage areas, docks, doorsWarehouse/shippingWarehouse/shipping will show racks, columns, aisles, electrical, material handling equipment, computer workstations, data collection points, printers, inventory location and quantitiesOfficeData infrastructure, electrical, personnel locations, solid and partition walls, common equipment (copiers, printers, etc.),

Facilitate employee input meetingsIMEC will facilitate meetings with your company’s management team and targeted floor personnel, to gain input and identify the facilities layout requirements with regard to:

• Product/process flow • Facility / infrastructure• Data transfer • Equipment• Inventory levels and management

Develop, design and present potential new layout(s) IMEC and your team of key employees will work to improve the process flow and efficiency based upon underlying principles of lean manufacturing and process flow efficiency. Efforts will focus on dock locations, equipment configurations, inventory management and handling practices, and expansion. The team will develop facilities layout options, showing the current operation best arranged within the facility, and offer recommendations to accommodate future growth.

Project management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is sometimes conflated with program management, however technically a program is actually a higher level construct: a group of related and somehow interdependent projects.

A project is a temporary endeavor, having a defined beginning and end (usually constrained by date, but can be by funding or deliverables[1]), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives[2], usually to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to business as usual (or operations) [3] , which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.

Project Management ProcessesTraditionally, project management includes a number of elements: four to five process groups, and a control system. Regardless of the methodology or terminology used, the same basic project management processes will be used.

The project development stages

Major process groups generally include:

Initiation Planning or development Production or execution Monitoring and controlling Closing

In project environments with a significant exploratory element (e.g., Research and development), these stages may be supplemented with decision points (go/no go decisions) at which the project's continuation is debated and decided. An example is the Stage-Gate model.

Initiation

Initiating Process Group Processes

The initiation processes determine the nature and scope of the project. If this stage is not performed well, it is unlikely that the project will be successful in meeting the business’ needs. The key project controls needed here are an understanding of the business environment and making sure that all necessary controls are incorporated into the project. Any deficiencies should be reported and a recommendation should be made to fix them.

The initiation stage should include a plan that encompasses the following areas:

Analyzing the business needs/requirements in measurable goals Reviewing of the current operations Financial analysis of the costs and benefits including a budget Stakeholder analysis , including users, and support personnel for the project Project charter including costs, tasks, deliverables, and schedule

Planning and design

Planning Process Group Activities

After the initiation stage, the project is planned to an appropriate level of detail. The main purpose is to plan time, cost and resources adequately to estimate the work needed and to effectively manage risk during project execution. As with the Initiation process group, a failure to adequately plan greatly reduces the project's chances of successfully accomplishing its goals.

Project planning generally consists of

determining how to plan (e.g. by level of detail or rolling wave); developing the scope statement; selecting the planning team; identifying deliverables and creating the work breakdown structure;

identifying the activities needed to complete those deliverables and networking the activities in their logical sequence;

estimating the resource requirements for the activities; estimating time and cost for activities; developing the schedule; developing the budget; risk planning; gaining formal approval to begin work.

Additional processes, such as planning for communications and for scope management, identifying roles and responsibilities, determining what to purchase for the project and holding a kick-off meeting are also generally advisable.

For new product development projects, conceptual design of the operation of the final product may be performed concurrent with the project planning activities, and may help to inform the planning team when identifying deliverables and planning activities.

Executing

Executing Process Group Processes

Executing consists of the processes used to complete the work defined in the project management plan to accomplish the project's requirements. Execution process involves coordinating people and resources, as well as integrating and performing the activities of the project in accordance with the project management plan. The deliverables are produced as outputs from the processes performed as defined in the project management plan.

Monitoring and controlling

Monitoring and controlling consists of those processes performed to observe project execution so that potential problems can be identified in a timely manner and corrective action can be taken, when necessary, to control the execution of the project. The key benefit is that project performance is observed and measured regularly to identify variances from the project management plan.

Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Processes[19]

Monitoring and Controlling includes:

Measuring the ongoing project activities (where we are); Monitoring the project variables (cost, effort, scope, etc.) against the project management plan and

the project performance baseline (where we should be); Identify corrective actions to address issues and risks properly (How can we get on track again); Influencing the factors that could circumvent integrated change control so only approved changes

are implemented

In multi-phase projects, the monitoring and controlling process also provides feedback between project phases, in order to implement corrective or preventive actions to bring the project into compliance with the project management plan.

Project Maintenance is an ongoing process, and it includes:

Continuing support of end users Correction of errors Updates of the software over time

Monitoring and Controlling cycle

In this stage, auditors should pay attention to how effectively and quickly user problems are resolved.

Over the course of any construction project, the work scope may change. Change is a normal and expected part of the construction process. Changes can be the result of necessary design modifications, differing site conditions, material availability, contractor-requested changes, value engineering and impacts from third parties, to name a few. Beyond executing the change in the field, the change normally needs to be documented to show what was actually constructed. This is referred to as Change Management. Hence, the owner usually requires a final record to show all changes or, more specifically, any change that modifies the tangible portions of the finished work. The record is made on the contract documents – usually, but not necessarily limited to, the design drawings. The end product of this effort is what the industry terms as-built

drawings, or more simply, “as built.” The requirement for providing them is a norm in construction contracts.

When changes are introduced to the project, the viability of the project has to be re-assessed. It is important not to lose sight of the initial goals and targets of the projects. When the changes accumulate, the forecasted result may not justify the original proposed investment in the project.

Closing

Closing Process Group Processes.[19]

Closing includes the formal acceptance of the project and the ending thereof. Administrative activities include the archiving of the files and documenting lessons learned.

This phase consists of:

Project close: Finalize all activities across all of the process groups to formally close the project or a project phase

Contract closure: Complete and settle each contract (including the resolution of any open items) and close each contract applicable to the project or project phase

Project control systems

Project control is that element of a project that keeps it on-track, on-time and within budget. Project control begins early in the project with planning and ends late in the project with post-implementation review, having a thorough involvement of each step in the process. Each project should be assessed for the appropriate level of control needed: too much control is too time consuming, too little control is very risky. If project control is not implemented correctly, the cost to the business should be clarified in terms of errors, fixes, and additional audit fees.

Control systems are needed for cost, risk, quality, communication, time, change, procurement, and human resources. In addition, auditors should consider how important the projects are to the financial statements, how reliant the stakeholders are on controls, and how many controls exist. Auditors should review the development process and procedures for how they are implemented. The process of development and the quality of the final product may also be assessed if needed or requested. A business may want the auditing firm to be involved throughout the process to catch problems earlier on so that they can be fixed more easily. An auditor can serve as a controls consultant as part of the development team or as an independent auditor as part of an audit.

Businesses sometimes use formal systems development processes. These help assure that systems are developed successfully. A formal process is more effective in creating strong controls, and auditors should review this process to confirm that it is well designed and is followed in practice. A good formal systems development plan outlines:

A strategy to align development with the organization’s broader objectives Standards for new systems Project management policies for timing and budgeting Procedures describing the process Evaluation of quality of change

project managementproject management, tools, process, plans and project planning tips

Here are rules, processes and tools for project planning and project management.

While project management skills are obviously important for project managers, interestingly the methods and tools that project managers use can be helpful for everyone.

A 'task' does not necessarily have to be called a 'project' in order for project management methods to be very useful in its planning and implementation. Even the smallest task can benefit from the use of a well-chosen project management technique or tool, especially in the planning stage.

Any task that requires some preparation to achieve a successful outcome, will probably be done better by using a few project management methods somewhere in the process. Project management methods can help in the planning and managing of all sorts of tasks, especially complex activities.

Project management is chiefly associated with planning and managing change in an organization, but a project can also be something unrelated to business - even a domestic situation, such as moving house, or planning a wedding.

Project management methods and tools can therefore be useful far more widely than people assume.

Project management techniques and project planning tools are useful for any tasks in which different outcomes are possible - where risks of problems and failures exist - and so require planning and assessing options, and organizing activities and resources to deliver a successful result.

Projects can be various shapes and sizes, from the small and straightforward to extremely large and highly complex.

In organizations and businesses, project management can be concerned with anything, particularly introducing or changing things, in any area or function, for example:

people, staffing and management products and services materials, manufacturing and production IT and communications plant, vehicles, equipment storage, distribution, logistics buildings and premises finance, administration, acquisition and divestment purchasing sales, selling, marketing human resources development and training customer service and relations quality, health and safety, legal and professional

technical, scientific, research and development new business development and anything else which needs planning and managing within organizations.

Successful project management, for projects large or small, tends to follow the process outlined below.

The same principles, used selectively and appropriately, also apply to smaller tasks.

Project management techniques are not just for project managers - they are available for anyone to use.

 

project management process1. Agree precise specification for the project . 2. Plan the project - time, team, activities, resources, financials - using suitable

project management tools. 3. Communicate the project plan to your project team - and to any other

interested people and groups. 4. Agree and delegate project actions . 5. Manage and motivate - inform, encourage, enable the project team. 6. Check, measure, monitor, review project progress - adjust project plans, and

inform the project team and others. 7. Complete project - review and report on project performance; give praise and

thanks to the project team. 8. Project follow-up - train, support, measure and report results and benefits.